It would be great if everyone made personal financial sacrifices for the things we thought were important right? The world would be a much better place in my estimation.
Relying on individual developer's ethics is not going to work. "There's always someone willing to write the kill-bot software." I've in the past objected to (and refused to) develop ethically questionable software. It doesn't make a difference, because Bill, two desks down, is happy to write whatever software boss tells him to write.
no the govt should just pay ubi because we're at the point of needing it. it'll only get worse. Businesses should automate so people are needed for less menial stuff and can just enjoy life and shit.
Not far from now even intellectual jobs will be a.i.
post scarcity star Trek civilization is very possible if we stop letting greed control us.
disclaimer : I run an ai automation agency, and support the fight against poverty and for universal healthcare and stuff, but the faster we automate the faster the govt is forced to roll out solutions to fix the problems automation creates.
What if replacing people's jobs is helping people?
Milk men, computers (the people kind), horse carriage chauffeurs, people who light
lamp posts (when they were oil based) we could go on here.
You are clearly coming from empathic place, but I am not sure your premise is nuanced enough. Lots of progress has "victims" but that doesn't necessarily make progress had.
The key bit of information I’m missing is where did those milk men, carriage chauffeurs, lamp lighters, whatever go and how did they get there after they were rendered useless .
Did they retrain for new careers? If so how did they afford the education/retraining necessary. How did they pay their rent/mortgage/etc. in the time in between it took them to do that? What are the new jobs that are going to be created after sweeping automation in service and knowledge industries?
I can think of a few jobs that probably won’t see automation anytime soon, but a lot of them are crap, or would result in a major quality of life degradation. I remember years before ChatGPT reading a lot of speculation on automation and what potential careers could survive in the face of some AI or robotics revolution and the jobs people considered safe from automation were things like caregiver. Just a quick google search shows the pay range for that job near starting at minimum wage.
Genuine question, I really don’t know. Personally I’d love to leave the software industry, but I don’t have any realistic alternative. Rent keeps getting more expensive, never less and the jobs that pay enough to keep up require expensive credentials that don’t only require a lot of money, but a lot of time as well.
I probably should read up on the history of this sort of stuff, but I take a look at places like the rust belt and it seems like the next career for a lot of the people in blue collar work that was moved or automated was “opioid addict”. Personally if I lose everything and am forced out on the street because I’m obsolete, I don’t give a flying shit what kind of new jobs there are, because they’ll be inaccessible to me.
The opioid addict cases are probably more when entire cities gets fired because a company moves or shuts down.
Surely there will be cases where those that are replaced are unable to find work, but I am willing to bet that
1. Those cases are somewhat rare
2. They "make sense" (e.g. close to retirement anyway)
The common case is just to get a new job. Maybe the new job is not as good, maybe it is actually better in the long run.
There are plenty of jobs to go around these days. Unemployment is very low.
If I were to give advice I would personally tell people to stop looking for work that is "safe from automation" because over a long horizon very little is safe. Figure out how to work with the technology instead. Don't need to code there are lots of other ways to contribute.
If you've been in software for any amount of time, and haven't written software that involves either automating processes (thereby making those processes less dependent on human labor) or increasing efficiency (doing more with less human labor) that's unusual.
